Critical Mass Part 1

CRITICAL Ma.s.s.

C M Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl.

Contents

INTRODUCTION by Frederik Pohl vii THE QUAKER CANNON 1.

MUTE INGLORIOUS TAM 31 THE WORLD OF MYRION FLOWERS 45.

THE GIFT OF GARIGOLLI 53.

A GENTLE DYING 83.

A HINT OF HENBANE 93.

THE MEETING 101.

THE ENGINEER 117.

NIGHTMARE WITH ZEPPELINS 127.

CRITICAL Ma.s.s 137.

AFTERWORD by Frederik Pohl 179.

INTRODUCTION by Frederik Pohl

During World War III was an Air Force weatherman, mostly in Italy. My friend and collaborator Cyril Kornbluth had a varied career. He started out as a machinist with the artillery, a safe and reasonably satisfying job, as well as one pretty useful to the war effort. Along came ASTP. ASTP was a marvelously do-good-ing program whereby certain soldiers could effectively drop out of the war entirely, attending college in uniform instead of fighting or holding down posts in the United States. I have never really understood what it had to do with the job of defeating Germany, Italy and j.a.pan, but it surely was a dream of delight to every GI, and Cyril signed up for it at once.

Catch-22 came along in 1944. The Army perceived that what it really needed was not so much well-rounded officer material as warm bodies to throw against the enemy. ASTP was canceled without warning, and everyone in it was immediately rea.s.signed to the infantry, as a private. The rest of us in uniform-even the rest of us-could not help feeling some compa.s.sion. When I went overseas it was on a troop transport that had once been a fruit-company freighter, called the Cristobal. About a hundred of the troops on board were weathermen like myself. The other 1,800 were former ASTP students, now about to join the Fifth Army's infantry divisions at Ca.s.sino. Some of them were still in their teens. Some of them had not been in the Army more than a few weeks. And some never walked away from Ca.s.sino.

At about the same time, in a different troop transport headed for England, Cyril was in a very similar convoy. He became a heavy machine-gunner, fought through the Battle of the Bulge and received a Bronze Star therefore. At least on paper he did. He never got the medal itself from the Army. I, on the other hand, had been given one, but it had never been made official; so a year or two after the war I gave him mine.

We both survived the war and returned to civilian life around the end of 1945. I went into the advertising business for a tune in New York. Cyril went to the University of Chicago on the GI Bill of Rights.

Old fellow-Futurian Richard Wilson was also in Chicago in those years, getting into news work with Trans-Radio Press wire service. He soon became head of their Chicago bureau, and recruited Cyril to work in the newsroom. When d.i.c.k moved on to higher things, first in the Was.h.i.+ngton bureau and then to the central headquarters office in New York, Cyril replaced him as Chicago bureau chief, quitting college to make time for that eighteen-hour-a-day job.

A few years of that turned out to be enough. In 1951 Cyril came east, determined to go back to writing science fiction.

I had just bought the house I still live in, thirteen ancient rooms on the Jersey sh.o.r.e, and Cyril and his pregnant wife came to stay with us while they sorted out their plans. I had begun a science-fiction novel about the future of the advertising business, and invited Cyril to collaborate on finis.h.i.+ng it. It became the first bit of science fiction to be published under the joint by-line "by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth" (all our previous collaborations had appeared under a variety of pseudonyms) when Horace Gold serialized it in Galaxy, under the t.i.tle of Gravy Planet. We were delighted. Horace paid us $1,400 for it, which was about as much money as either of us had ever seen in one lump before. A while later we managed to get lan Ballantine to bring it out in book form, and, actually, it hasn't really done badly at all: something over ten million copies, in something like forty languages, earning something like a hundred tunes the price we wrote it for, as of even date. The book t.i.tle was The s.p.a.ce Merchants.

Over the next half-dozen years we wrote six other novels together, three which were science fiction- Gladiator-at-Law, Search the Sky and Wolfbane-a.nd three which were not. Presidential Year was about, well, about a presidential year: about a man who sought the nomination, and what he had to go through to get nominated. It appeared in 1956 and was well enough received critically, but not very exciting hi sales. We sold the film rights, but the movie was never made; and one of the many reasons why I wish Cyril-, were still alive is that I would like it if we could have revised and reissued it in the new post-Watergate political scene. A Town Is Drowning was a topical novel about a hurricane hitting the East Coast. A couple of them had, not long before/One of them had taken part, of my roof off and another had flooded Cyril's upstate New York house out, and we viewed the novel as an attempt to get even with the elements. Sorority House was a semis.e.xy ripoff novel published under a pseudonym to complete a contract Cyril had come to regret having made. All of these non-sf novels had things in them which I like and wish we had used in better books, but we didn't.

At the same tune we were going on with our own individual writing.

Cyril's own novels-Takeoff, Not This August and The Syndic-were appearing and doing very well (not to mention the half-dozen or so other novels, not science fiction, rather like Sorority House, which were appearing as paperback originals under pen names). We were both doing about as well as we had any reason to expect. I remember having a cup of coffee with Cyril when he had just had an editorial in the New York Daily News plugging one of his books, and I had been mentioned by Time in connection with one of mine. This sort of ma.s.s-media publicity for science fiction was not common hi the fifties, and we were agreeably expectant of great things. We undertook to check with each other six months later to see what they had done for us in sales. (As it turned out, nothing we could detect.) There was a certain amount of mutual a.s.sistance between us even on some of the stories which did not appear as collaborations. I remember specifically Cyril bogging down on his novel Takeoff, which he had originally intended to call something like The Martians Upstairs, with actual Martians in it. This proved complex and difficult to write, and we spent one long night replotting it into the published form, omitting the Martians. And I remember showing Mm the rough draft of my novella The Midas Plague, and getting from him some first-rate ideas on plotting and bits of business.

I think if Cyril had lived he would have become one of the all-tune greats of the field. He was just hitting his stride when his health began to falter.

Cyril had always been a little plumper than was strictly good for him. When the Army made him a machine-gunner, lugging a 50-calibre-heavy MG around the Ardennes forest, they shortened his life. Exertions damaged his heart, and hi his midthirties his doctor told hun that he had a clear choice. He could give up smoking, drinking, spices in his food, a lot of the food itself, irregular hours and excitement; or he could die of hypertension.

For a while Cyril tried doing what the doctor told him. He took his medicine: tranquilizers, mostly, the not-quite-perfected tranquilizers of the fifties, which had such side-effects as making him a little confused and a little intellectually sluggish. He followed his diet rigorously. He came out to visit us during that period, and my wife cooked salt-free meals and baked salt-free bread. We couldn't do much writing. He was not up to it. But I showed him a novel I was having problems with. He read the pages of the first draft and handed it back to me. "Needs salt," he said, and that was all.

So I suppose Cyril made his choice. In his place, I think I might have made the same one. He went back to coffee and cigarettes, gave up the medication, went back to writing, finished the revisions on Woljbane, wrote two or three of his best novelettes, signed on as an editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction -his first experiment with editing, rather than writing, science fiction, and one which he enjoyed enormously. ... And then on a snowy March morning I had a phone call from Mary, his wife, to say that Cyril had shoveled out their driveway to free his car, run to catch a train and dropped dead on the station platform.

He left a bundle of incomplete ma.n.u.scripts and fragments, some of which I was later able to revise and complete. Most of the stories in this volume came out of that bale of paper, and were published after his death.

THE QUAKER CANNON.

This story is about 12,000 words long. I see by my notes that the fragment Cyril left incomplete amounted to only about 3,000 words, which means that 9,000 of the words in the story are mine. And yet, reading it over, I can find no major plot element and only a few incidents that I remember contributing to it, This explains why I have trouble when someone asks me how much each of us contributed to our collaborations, and why my usual answer is, "I don't know."

LIEUTENANT JOHN KRAMER did crossword puzzles during at least eighty per cent of his waking hours. His cubicle in Bachelor Officers Quarters was untidy; one wall was stacked solid with newspapers and magazines to which he subscribed for their puzzle pages. He meant, from week to week, to clean them out but somehow never found time. The ern, or erne, a sea eagle, soared vertically through his days and by night the ai, a three-toed sloth, crept horizontally. In edes, or Dutch communes, dyers retted ecru, quaffing ades by the tun and thought was postponed.

John Kramer was in disgrace and, at thirty-eight, well on his way to becoming the oldest first lieutenant in the North American (and Allied) Army. He had been captured in '82 as an aftermath of the confused fighting around Tsingtao. A few exquisitely unpleasant months pa.s.sed and he then delivered three TV lectures for the yutes. In them he announced his total conversion to Neo-Utilitarianism, denounced the North American (and Allied) military command as a loathesome pack of war-waging, anti-utilitarian mad dogs, and personally admitted the waging of viral warfare against the United Utilitarian Republics.

The yutes, or Utilitarians, had been faithful to their principles. They had wanted Kramer only for what he could do for them, not for his own sweet self, and when they had got the juice out of him they exchanged him. In '83 he came out of his fog at Fort Bradley, Utah, to find himself being court-martialed.

He was found guilty as charged, and sentenced to a reprimand. The lightness of the sentence was something to be a little proud of, if not very much. It stood as a grudging tribute to the months he had held out against involutional melancholia in the yute Blank Tanks. For exchanged PW's, the severity of their courts-martial was hi inverse proportion to the duration of their ordeal in Utilitarian hands. Soldiers who caved in after a couple of days of sense-starvation could look forward only to a firing squad. Presumably a returned soldier dogged (or rigid) enough to be driven into hopeless insanity without cooperating would have been honorably acquitted by his court, but such a case had not yet come up.

Kramer's "reprimand" was not the face-to-face bawling-out suggested to a civilian by the word. It was a short letter with numbered paragraphs which said (1) you are reprimanded, (2) a copy of this reprimand will be punched on your profile card. This tagged him forever as a foul ball, destined to spend the rest of his military life shuffling from one dreary a.s.signment to another, without hope of promotion or reward.

He no longer cared. Or thought he did not; which came to the same thing.

He was not liked in the Officers Club. He was bad company. Young officers pa.s.sing through Bradley on their way to glory might ask him, "What's it redly to like in a Blank Tank, Kramer?" But beyond answering, "You go nuts," what was there to talk about? Also he did not drink, because when he drank he went on to become drunk, and if he became drunk he would cry.

So he did a crossword puzzle in bed before breakfast, dressed, went to his office, signed papers, did puzzles until lunch, and so on until the last one in bed at night. Nominally he was Commanding Officer of the 561st Provisional Reception Battalion. Actually he was (with a few military overtones) the straw boss of a gang of clerks in uniform who saw to the arrival, bedding, feeding, equipping, inoculation and transfer to a training unit of one thousand scared kids per week.

On a drizzle-swept afternoon in the spring of '85 Kramer was sounding one of those military overtones. It was his appointed day for a "surprise" inspection of Company D of his battalion. Impeccable in dress blues, he was supposed to descend like a thunderbolt on this company or that, catching them all unaware, striding arrogantly down the barracks aisle between bunks, white-gloved and eagle-eyed for dust, maddened at the sight of disarray, vengeful against such contraband as playing cards or light reading matter. Kramer knew, quite well, that one of his orderly room clerks always telephoned the doomed company to warn that he was on his way. He did not particularly mind it. What he minded was unfair definitions of key words, and ridiculously variant spellings.

The permanent-party sergeant of D Company bawled "Tench-/z"tf" when Kramer snapped the door open and stepped crisply into the 'barracks. Kramer froze his face into its approved expression of controlled annoyance and opened his mouth to give the noncom his orders. But the sergeant had miscalculated. One of the scared kids was still frantically mopping the aisle.

Kramer halted. The kid spun around in horror, made some kind of attempt to present arms with the mop and failed. The mop shot from his soapy hands like a slung baseball bat, and its soggy gray head schlooped against the lieutenant's dress-blue chest.

The kid turned white and seemed about to faint on the damp board floor. The other kids waited to see him destroyed.

Kramer was mildly irritated. "At ease," he said. "Pick up that mop. Sergeant, confound it, next time they buzz you from the orderly room don't cut it so close."

The kids sighed perceptibly and glanced covertly at each other in the big bare room, beginning to suspect it might not be too bad after all. Lieutenant Kramer then resumed the expression of a nettled bird of prey and strode down the aisle. Long ago he had worked out a "random" selection of bunks for special attention and now followed it through habit. If he had thought about it any more, he would have supposed that it was still spy-proof; but every noncom in his cadre had long since discovered that Kramer stopped at either every second bunk on the right and every third on the left, or every third bunk on the right and every second on the left-depending on whether the day of the month was odd or even. This would not have worried Kramer if he had known it; but he never even noticed that the men beside the bunks he stopped at were always the best-shaved, best-policed and healthiest looking in each barracks.

Regardless, he delivered a certain quota of meaningless demerits which were gravely recorded by the sergeant. Of blue-eyed men on the left and brown-eyed men on the right (this, at least, had not been penetrated by the noncoms) he went on to ask their names and home towns. Before discovering crossword puzzles he had memorized atlases, and so he had something to say about every home town he had yet encountered. In this respect at least he considered himself an above-average officer, and indeed he was.

It wasn't the Old Army, not by a long shot, but when the draft age went down to fifteen some of the Old Army's little ways had to go. One experimental reception station in Virginia was trying out a Barracks Mother system. Kramer, thankful for small favors, was glad they hadn't put him on that project. Even here he was expected, at the end of the inspection, to call the "men" around him and ask if anything was bothering them. Something always was. Some gangling kid would scare up the nerve to ask, gee, lieutenant, I know what the Morale Officer said, but exactly why didn't we ever use the megaton-head missiles, and another would want to know how come Lunar Base was such a washout, tactically speaking, sir. And then he would have to rehea.r.s.e the dry "recommended discussion themes" from the briefing books; and then, finally, one of them, nudged on by others, would pipe up, "Lieutenant, what's it like in the Blank Tanks?" And he would know that already, forty-eight hours after induction, the kids all knew about what Lieutenant John Kramer had done.

But today he was spared. When he was halfway through the rigmarole the barracks phone rang and the sergeant apologetically answered it.

He returned from his office-cubicle on the double, looking vaguely frightened. "Compliments of General Grote's secretary, sir, and will you please report to him at G-l as soon as possible."

"Thank you, sergeant. Step outside with me a moment." Out on the duckboard walk, with the drizzle trickling down his neck, he asked: "Sergeant, who is General Grote?"

"Never heard of him, sir."

Neither had Lieutenant Kramer.

He hurried to Bachelor Officers Quarters to change his sullied blue jacket, not even pausing to glance at the puzzle page of the Times, which had arrived while

he was at "work." Generals were special. He hurried out again into the drizzle.

Around him and unnoticed were the artifacts of an Army base at war. Sky-eye'search radars popped from their silos to scan the horizons for a moment and then retreat, the burden of search taken up by the next in line. Helicopter sentries on guard duty prowled the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp. Fort Bradley was not all reception center. Above-ground were the barracks, warehouses and rail and highway termini for processing recruits-ninety thousand men and all their goods-but they were only the skin over the fort itself. They were, as the scared kids told each other in the dayrooms, naked to the air. If the yutes ever did spring a megaton attack, they would become a thin coating of charcoal on the parade ground, but they would not affect the operation of the real Fort Bradley a bit.

The real Fort Bradley was a hardened installation beneath meters of reinforced concrete, some miles of rambling warrens that held the North American (and Allied) Army's G-l. Its business was people: the past, present and future of every soul in the Army.

G-l decided that a fifteen-year-old in Duluth was unlikely to succeed in civilian schools and drafted him. G-l punched his Army tests and civilian records on cards, consulted its card-punched tables of military requirements and a.s.signed him, perhaps, to Machinist Training rather than Telemetering School. G-l yanked a platoon leader halfway around the world from Formosa and handed him a commando for a raid on the yutes' Polar Station Seven. G-l put foulball Kramer at the "head" of the 561st PRB. G-l promoted and allocated and staffed and rewarded and punished.

Foulball Kramer approached the guardbox at the elevators to the warrens and instinctively squared his shoulders and smoothed his tie.

General Grote, he thought. He hadn't seen a general officer since he'd been commissioned. Not close up.

Colonels and majors had court-martialed him. He didn't know who Grote was, whether he had one star or six, whether he was a.s.signment, Qualifications, Training, Evaluation, Psychological-or Disciplinary.

Military Police looked him over at the elevator head. They read him like a book. Kramer wore his record on his chest and sleeves. Dull gold bars spelled out the overseas months-for his age and arm-, the Infantry, not enough. "Formosa," said a green ribbon, and "the storming of the beach" said a small bronze spearpoint on it. A brown ribbon told them "Chinese Mainland," and the stars on it meant that he had engaged hi three of the five mainland campaigns-presumably Canton, Mukden and Tsingtao, since they were the first. After that, nothing. Especially not the purple ribbon that might indicate a wound serious enough to keep him out of further fighting.

The ribbons, his age and the fact that he was still a first lieutenant were grounds enough for the MP's to despise him. An officer of thirty-eight should be a captain at least. Many were majors and some were colonels. "You can go down, Lieutenant," they told the patent foulball, and he went down to the interminable concrete tunnels of G-l.

A display machine considered the name General Grote when he typed it on its keyboard, and told him with a map where the general was to be found. It was a longjsh walk through the tunnels. While he walked past banks of clicking card-sorters and their servants he pondered other information the machine had gratuitously supplied: GROTE, Lawrence W, Lt Gen, 0-459732, Una.s.signed.

It did not lessen any of Kramer's puzzles. A three-star general, then. He couldn't possibly have anything to do with disciplining a lousy first-John. Lieutenant generals ran Army Groups, gigantic ad hoc a.s.semblages of up to a hundred divisions, complete with air forces, missile groups, amphibious a.s.sault teams, even carrier and missile-sub task forces. The fact of Ms rank indicated that, whoever he was, he was an immensely able and tenacious person. He had gone through at least a twenty-year thres.h.i.+ng of the wheat from the chaff, all up the screening and evaluation boards from second lieutenant to, say, lieutenant colonel, and then the murderous grind of accelerated courses at Command and General Staff School, the fanatically rigid selection for the War College, an obstacle course designed not to tram the substandard up to competence but to keep them out. It was just this side of impossible for a human being to become a lieutenant general. And yet a few human beings in every generation did bulldoze their way through that h'ttle gap between the impossible and the almost impossible. And such a man was una.s.signed?

Kramer found the office at last. A motherly, but sharp-eyed, WAC major told him to go right in.

John Kramer studied his three-star general while going through the ancient rituals of reporting-as-or-dered. General Grote was an old man, straight, spare, white-haired, tanned. He wore no overseas bars. On his chest were all the meritorious service ribbons his country could bestow, but none of the decorations of the combat soldier. This was explained by a modest sunburst centered over the ribbons. General Grote was, had always been, General Staff Corps. A desk man.

"Sit down, Lieutenant," Grote said, eyeing him casually. "You've never heard of me, I a.s.sume."

"I'm afraid not, sir."

"As I expected," said Grote complacently. "I'm not a das.h.i.+ng tank commander or one of those flying generals who leads his own raids. I'm one of the people who moves the das.h.i.+ng tank commanders and flying generals around the board like chess pieces. And now, confound it, I'm going to be a das.h.i.+ng combat leader at last. You may smoke if you like."

Kramer obediently lit up.

"Dan Medway," said the general, "wants me to start from scratch, build up a striking force and hit the Asian mainland across the Bering Strait."

Kramer was horrified twice-first by the reference to The Supreme Commander as "Dan" and second by the fact that he, a lieutenant, was being told about high strategy.

"Relax," the general said. "Why you're here, now. You're going to be my aide."

Kramer was horrified again. The general grinned.

"Your card popped out of the machinery," he said, and that was all there was to say about that, "and so you're going to be a highly privileged character and everybody will detest you. That's the way it is with aides. You'll know everything I know. And vice versa; that's the important part. You'll run errands for me, do investigations, serve as hatchet man, see that my pajamas are pressed without starch and make coffee the way I like it-coa.r.s.e grind, brought to the boil for just a moment hi an old-fas.h.i.+oned coffee pot. Actually what you'll do is what I want you to do from day to day. For these privileges you get to wear a blue fourragere around your left shoulder which marks you as a man not to be trifled with by colonels, brigadiers or MP's. That's the way it is with aides. And, I don't know if you have any outside interests, women or chess or drinking. The machinery didn't mention any. But you'll have to give them up if you do."

"Yes, sir," said Kramer. And it seemed wildly possible that he might never touch pencil to puzzle again. With something to do- "We're Operation Ripsaw," said the general. "So far, that's me, Margaret out there hi the office and you. In addition to other duties, you'll keep a diary of Ripsaw, by the way, and I want you to have a summary with you at all times in case I need it. Now call in Margaret, make a pot of coffee, there's a little stove thing in the washroom there, and I'll start putting together my general staff."

It started as small and as quietly as that.

11.

It was a week before Kramer got back to the 561st long enough to pick up his possessions, and then he left the stacks of Timeses and Sat.u.r.day Reviews where they lay, puzzles and all. No time. The first person to hate him was Margaret, the motherly major. For all her rank over him, she was a secretary and he was an aide with a fourragere who had the general's willing ear. She began a policy of nonresistance that was noncooperation, too; she would not deliberately obstruct him, but she would allow him to poke through the files for ten minutes before volunteering the information that the folder he wanted was already on the general's desk. This interfered with the smooth performance of Kramer's duties, and of course the general spotted it at once.

"It's nothing," said Kramer when the general called him on it. "I don't like to say anything."

"Go on," General Grote urged. "You're not a soldier any more; you're a rat."

"I think I can handle it, sir."

The general motioned silently to the coffee pot and waited while Kramer fixed him a cup, two sugars, no cream. He said: "Tell me everything, always. All the dirty rumors about inefficiency and favoritism. Your suspicions and hunches. Anybody that gets in your way-or more important, in mine. In the underworld they shoot stool-pigeons, but here we give them blue cords for their shoulders. Do you understand?"

Kramer did. He did not ask the general to intercede with the motherly major, or transfer her; but he did handle it himself. He discovered it was very easy. He simply threatened to have her sent to Narvik.

With the others it was easier. Margaret had resented him because she was senior in Operation Ripsaw to him, but as the others were sucked hi they found him there already. Instead of resentment, their att.i.tude toward him was purely fear.

The next people to hate him were the aides of Grote's general staff because he was a wild card in the deck. The five members of the staff-Chief, Personnel, Intelligence, Plans & Training and Operations-proceeded with their orderly, systematic jobs day by day, building Ripsaw . . . until the inevitable moment when Kramer would breeze in with, "Fine job, but the general suggests-" and the unhorsing of many a.s.sumptions, and the undoing of many days' work. That was his job also. He was a bird of ill omen, a coiled snake in fair gra.s.s, a hired killer and a professional betrayer of confidences-though it was not long before there were no confidences to betray, except from an occasional young, new officer who hadn't learned his way around, and those not worth betraying. That, as the general had said, was the way it was with aides. Kramer wondered sometimes if he liked what he was doing, or liked himself for doing it. But he never carried the thought through. No time.

Troops completed basic training or were redeployed from rest areas and entrained, emplaned, em-bussed or embarked for the scattered staging areas of Ripsaw. Great forty-wheeled trucks bore nuclear cannon up the Alcan Highway at a snail's pace. Air groups and missile sections launched on training exercises over Canadian wasteland that closely resembled tundra, with grid maps that bore names like Maina Pylgin and Kamenskoe. Yet these were not Ripsaw, not yet, only the separate tools that Ripsaw would someday pick up and use.